Scientia Professor Justin Gooding was born in Melbourne Australia. He graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) from Melbourne University before spending two years working for ICI Research on explosives. He then returned to University obtaining a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford and received post-doctoral training at the Institute of Biotechnology in Cambridge University. He returned to Australia in 1997 as a Vice-Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) before commencing a lectureship at Flinders University in 1998 and then UNSW in 1999. He was promoted to full professor in 2006 and in 2011 he was promoted to Scientia Professor, the highest award for research performance given by UNSW. He was one of the recipients of a 2004 NSW Young Tall Poppy award, a 2005 Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, the 2007 RACI Lloyd Smythe Medal for Analytical Chemistry, the 2009 Eureka Prize for Scientific Research, the 2011 RACI R.H. Stokes Medal for electrochemical research, the RACI 2011 G.H. Smith Medal for contributions to chemistry and the 2012 Royal Society of Chemistry Australasian Lecturer. He is currently an ARC Professorial Fellow in the School of Chemistry at UNSW and a co-director of the Australian Centre for NanoMedicine. He leads a research team of 23 people interested in surface modification and nanotechnology for biosensors, biomaterials, electron transfer and medical applications.